Don't shoot the messenger here... I know they are only pigs... and I know they are meant to be slaughtered anyhow... But don't you think they could be treated a bit better then This?
.....the animals, including sheep, pigs, horses, cattle and poultry, can face several weeks housed in cramped and overcrowded conditions, with inadequate rest, food and water. Thousands die in transit each day, from disease, hunger and stress.....pigs trucked from Canada to California, and then shipped to Hawaii. Slaughtering the animals there allows the tourist hotels to label the pork as locally produced.
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I think it is becoming more enticing all the time to become a vegan when you hear this stuff, just to do my part in ending the market demand for meat. After reading lots of information, I think I would be so much healthier anyway. To bad enough people wouldn't do the same to put an end to this.
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Just seems odd to ship pigs here when there are so many problems with feral pigs (even downtown by the University there are free range pigs!), if only there was a luxery cache in Hawaiian wild pig at the resorts!
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Where are they slaughtering these "thousands" at? Do we have any slaughter houses left on Oahu? They are also valuable sales items even if they are also live critters so I doubt they are allowing that great of a percentage of them to die. If they did that they wouldn't be in business very long.
Generally we ship cattle from here to Canada and then walk them across the border to the mainland United States. That has to do with the Jones act and which ships can go to which ports. They may use the same containers to ship pigs back here since otherwise they would be sending the containers back empty although that would be shipping pigs out from Canada and not the mainland U.S. The cattle are shipped in special shipping containers so they would have to ship those back and the price would be about the same whether they are full or empty, I would think since ocean freight is calculated by volume and not weight.
"I like yard sales," he said. "All true survivalists like yard sales."
Kurt Wilson
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This kind of thing is what drove me to being a vegan 18 years ago. Pigs have as much intelligence, personality, and need for social interaction as dogs do, and people would be prosecuted ala Michael Vick if we did the same thing to dogs. I could not provide myself any logical argument as to why one kind of animal it was ok to torture, when I would never pay someone to do that to a dog or cat so I could eat it. The more you read on the topic, the more horrifying it gets. Seeing videos on the PETA site was enough to turn a good friend of mine into a vegetarian that day. Ok, off soapbox now  but this is a topic I feel strongly about, so I couldn't not respond.
quote:
Originally posted by Hotzcatz
Where are they slaughtering these "thousands" at? Do we have any slaughter houses left on Oahu? ....
My guess is the Kahua Slaughterhouse out in Ewa Beach.
Kahua slaughterhouse in Ewa, the only operational USDA-approved facility on the island of Oahu that has the capacity to slaughter approximately 28000 hogs
According to This report
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The only pork we eat is mainland grain fed! There is local pork available, but we prefer the grained meat! For kalua or other whole cooking methods, the local pig is best!
I intend to find a local source of beef when we get settled! And it is local beef who go to the mainland to fatten, the return trip is usually on ice!
Religious reasons involving slaughter, drives the live export to mideast!
Gordon J Tilley
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Wow!
This is very strange, really. It has brought negative attention to agriculture, because of the vast gulf between people and the food they eat (maybe I'll do a thread there later).
If this pigs fly to Hawaii story is true, I would like someone to tell me where these thousands of pigs are unloaded from ships. That's a lot of squealin' and ****tin' -- take it from this has-been pig farmer. While Ewa Beach might (still) have abatoir capacity, I am not aware of anything approaching the type of livestock handling facility it would require for unloading, and holding up to 48 hours for slaughter, thousands of hogs weighing 200- 250 lbs each, that are consuming lots of feed and water (no, the hogs are not left without feed and water for more than two hours -- you'd know that if you ever met and listened to hundreds, much less thousands, of hungry, thirsty hogs).
The story that anybody is going to spend the kind of $ it takes to truck thousands of hogs from Canada to California and then by sea to Hawaii has a number of dots that do not connect. Did you ever hear of shrinkage? Death loss? These words are about $ and nobody in the hog business makes $ when you got the kind of shrinkage and death loss for 24 to 48 hours on the road and 7 days at sea.
btw: where are these "tourist hotels" that are "labelling the pork as locally produced."?
Urban Myth: Pigs fly.
James Weatherford, Ph.D.
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Sorry Damon, that's from a vegan reporter, so the source is suspect. The number of 28,000 was an annual amount in 1999 and it was down to 23,000 in 2003 so we don't even know if the slaughterhouse is even still in operation today.
Also, if you take the NEXT LINE of the quote it goes like this:
USDA approved facility on the island of Oahu that has the capacity to slaughter approximately 28,000 hogs and 5,000 cattle annually. The Kahua Meat Company, owner of the Kahua slaughterhouse, has announced the closure of this facility as of November 30, 1993.
So, where ARE they slaughtering these thousands of pigs at?
"I like yard sales," he said. "All true survivalists like yard sales."
Kurt Wilson
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Pass me Damon's pork chop and I'll have a fat ass cowboy cut rib eye steak too since your all giving up meat. If were planning a BBQ, I like baby back ribs, hot links, ham and everything on the cow but the lips & ass. I use the same logic for dealing with the "mind trip" of the slaugher house, the same way I do Running water out of the faucet. I have a general idea where it comes from but I'm not caught up in th details of it.
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